Please take note of our
systems specs for both the Intel and AMD test platforms.
Comparable system components were used in each system and a
clean installation of Windows XP (with SP1) was setup before each run of
benchmarks.

We fired up WCPUID to get an
inside look at the Athlon XP 2700+. The actual clockspeed of
this new CPU is 2171Hz, with the 2800+ coming in at 2254MHz.
The 2700+'s clock speed is calculated by multiplying the 167MHz
front side bus by 13 (13x167=2171). We also took some
shots of the CacheID information, the Standard feature flags and
the Enhanced feature flags. The CacheID shot shows the
Athlon XP 2700+ still has 64K of 2-Way set associative Instruction L1
cache, 64K of 2-Way set associative data L1 cache and 256K
of full speed, 16-Way set associative L2 cache for a total of 384K of effective
on-die cache. In essence, the increased FSB is the
only change made to the new Athlon XP 2700+ and 2800+.

Overclocking The
New Athlon XP

Nothing Too
Crazy...

We didn't have the best luck
overclocking our particular Athlon XP 2700+, but don't read
too much into our experience though. We were using a
pre-production CPU, with a pre-production motherboard.
We suspect that retail product will hit significantly higher
clock speeds than our samples did. With that said, we
still had some luck...

CPU @ 2275MHz

MEM @ 2275MHz

MM @ 2275MHz

CACHE @ 2275MHz

We didn't
attempt to unlock our particular CPU, but like the 2600+,
unlocking the 2700+'s multiplier should be as simple as
bridging the fifth L3 trace. We overclocked our CPU by
raising the FSB until the system was no longer stable.
The top FSB frequency we were able to hit was 175MHz, for a
maximum clock speed of 2275MHz. We're fairly certain
our Athlon XP 2700+ would have gone higher and that the
pre-production A7N8X motherboard was holding us back. At a 175MHz FSB, the system was completely stable, but if we raised the
FSB to the next step available in the BIOS, 177MHz, the
system would not post. The SANDRA scores above were
run while the system was overclocked. As you can see,
the performance was very good, besting every reference
system in the CPU and Multimedia benchmarks.

Occasionally,
engineering samples, like the CPU and motherboard we're
looking at today, have minor issues that should be resolved
in the shipping product. We were informed that our
Athlon XP 2700+ had a problem with its internal thermal
sensor and would misreport its operating temperature, so we
unfortunately won't have any "official" core temperatures to
report. AMD lists the max thermal power of the 2700+
at 68.3W, which is exactly the same as the 2600+, so core
temperatures should hover at right about the same levels.
Here are the complete specs...

SiSoft SANDRA Benchmarks

Light Duty
Synthetic Benchmarking

SANDRA (the System
ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant)
is an information and diagnostic utility put out by the good
folks at SiSoftware. Besides benchmarking, it provides a
host of other information about your installed hardware and
operating system. We ran five of the built-in sub-system
tests that are part of the SANDRA 2002 suite (CPU,
Multimedia, Memory, Cache and File System).

CPU @ 2170MHz

MEM @ 2170MHz

MM @ 2170MHz

CACHE @ 2170MHz

HARD DRIVE

At default
clock speeds, the Athlon XP 2700+ and nForce 2 powered Asus
A7N8X exhibited excellent performance. The Athlon
simply owned everything in ALU performance. Multimedia
performance was also great and memory bandwidth scores were the
best we've seen with a "stock" Athlon system.